YES I AM PART OF THE WHOLE FREAKIN EVIL PLOT

Aww shit. We're screwed. These ppl are called crossposters, the have TAKEN OVER alt.tv.Dawons-creek and now they are coming for south park... Sniff. -me

They're also at quite a few other groups I subscribe to. That's what 99% of the posts are in those 2 places--these awful newsgroup hangovers, that they are (I don't make sense). Anyone out there know how to get rid of cross-posters? Or is this hopeless? Don't think I'm stupid--I'm just still sorta new to newsgroups here--only been actively posting since July. <looks at Mark, since he knows a ton about how to get rid of trolls>

~Kyle Broslofski~

The same ways as explained earlier for trolls, which are:

(1) Use killfiles, and/or

(2) Ignore them. This includes NOT being stupid enough to waste space here posting pompous announcements to the intruder saying you've plonked him. (These are equivalent to a 4-year-old teasing a sandbox bully who's already being dragged off by his mom -- the disturbance is over, but the victim craves this smallminded revenge more than the comfort and safety that's being delivered. It's very childish.)

But let's back up a bit.

Try this simple experiment to demonstrate what the *real* problem is:

(This assumes you have a newsreader like that provided with Netscape 4, which allows you to sort articles by the various columns (Date, Author, Subject, etc.).)

First, set the newsreader to show *all* articles, not just the new or unread ones. Then, set it show the articles *not* threaded, so that each individual post in the article-index window appears on a line by itself, rather than packed into a thread that expands when clicked on. Now, click on the AUTHOR column to sort all the posts by their authors.

This will give you a screen showing all the articles that your server still contains for this newsgroup, sorted by author. That is, all the articles *and* responses posted by one user will be listed together, followed by all the articles and responses by the alphabetically-next user, and so on. (This is how I got the initial data for the chart I posted last month showing the most frequent posters.)

Look over what this screen shows you, and notice who the people are who have made the *largest* number of posts. Hint: They're NOT the trolls. Mostly, they are the people who do the most public "plonking" -- the people who just *have* to respond, at length, to every tiny indignity they sense. Essentially they're people who wouldn't *dream* of keeping quiet, even when it would be the smartest move. Totally self-absorbed people, the kind you probably wouldn't want to spend 10 minutes with.

Click on about 20 of their posts at random, just to be sure. How many of them have anything to do with South Park? Usually, almost none.

THESE are the people who need to be stopped -- or suckerpunched, or muzzled, or shot up with tranquilizer darts. The trolls & crossposters are an *infinitesimal* portion of the total posts. If we were rid of the people who don't have the maturity to ignore the trolls, we would hardly notice the disruption -- because there would be so little.

What would also help is to minimize *public discussions* about how to kill trolls. Yes, even discussions like this one. That means, when a newbie arrives and replies to a troll, or whines about it or asks how to get rid of it, it's *not* always smartest to post a reply to the group. Instead, send him or her a *private* email, so that your assistance doesn't just create another off-topic thread here. (People who don't know the difference between public posts and private email should not be using the Internet -- and in my view should be cut into squares and used as food. Soylent Kenny.)

(The argument that others who are listening but not posting may want to know the answer is not valid here; others who are not posting are ...NOT POSTING. That means they're not feeding trolls to start with.)

You'd think this would work -- I mean the staying quiet, not the eating of the stupidest posters. And it would. It would be a very simple solution -- EXCEPT that it requires *everyone* to cooperate and behave maturely about it. It only takes one or two loud-ass control freaks bitching daily about trolls to keep the group clogged with that crap, essentially forever. (You know who you are, but of course you're not reading *this* because you rarely read anything except your own rants and perhaps the instructions on your tampon box. Oooooh that was low, wasn't it? Good. It needed to be.)

If *those* people could be stopped, the trolls and crossposts would become virtually unnoticeable. Trolls and crossposts probably would not stop (they're like cockroaches; you'll never destroy the entire species). But they'd make almost no difference, because their posts wouldn't end up sending 20 of us into the usual red-eyed frenzy about them, nor into the subfrenzy of publicly ragging on the troll-feeders and public plonkers.

In order for killfiltering & ignoring to *work*, each of us has to step outside ourselves and notice the effect of every post we make. If a post isn't about South Park (& note that posts about trolls are NOT about South Park, even if the troll's post *was*), then that post DOES NOT HELP. Even a post like this one is of dubious value because most of the people to whom it applies won't take it to heart.

I was gonna close by saying "Sorry if this offends anyone." But ya know what? I'm *not* sorry. I HOPE this offends the troll-feeders and professional bitchmeisters (especially the main one, whom I've killfiled *and* mailfiltered, so I won't see her response, if any, whether it's public or private). These people take up more space in my killfile than all the trolls put together. After a certain point, trolls *aren't* the problem, and this newsgroup is past that point.

And with no more fresh episodes til Halloween, the situation is likely to get much worse over the next three weeks, so I may just bail until then. Otherwise, what's the point? Is it worthwhile to sift through mountains of forgettable lameass one-liners from idiots who think a newsgroup is the same thing as a chat space? And is it really fun to comb through 60 or 70 messages when all but 4 of them are worthless? Is *anyone* finding this group worth his or her time?

If so, you have my sympathy -- because if your life is so empty that the current content of this newsgroup enriches it, you truly deserve that sympathy.

-- Mark Tangard  --------------------------------
----------- "Life is nothing if you aren't obsessed." --John Waters
-------------------------------------------------------------------
***** Tired of trolls, troll feeders, and off-topic bullshit? *****
Join SouthParkNet, the new, *moderated* South Park discussion list.
Subscribe free at http://www.onelist.com/subscribe.cgi/SouthParkNet
-------------------------------------------------------------------

In article , [email] wrote:

All right. I just thought of something: I think you can manage to get rid of crossposters if you set your newsreader to kill all messages where the list of newsgroups the message is sent to contains a comma. If there's a comma in this field, it always separates two newsgroups. Example: "Newsgroups: alt.tv.southpark, alt.sex." Since there's a comma between the two, the message will be killed. <bow> And to all you crossposters out there: Plonk.